Freddie Gibbs: In The Tape Deck

A few months ago, as a prelude to the release of B.o.B's debut LP, I compiled a set of 36 tracks featured on The Tape Deck from '08 to '10. For this second go-round I thought I'd feature Gary, Indiana's own Freddie Gibbs, not because of his liner notes but because I promised I would, #beleedat. Gangsta Gibbs is prepped to drop his Str8 Killa EP on August 3rd. Prior to the release, XXL will also be providing fans with a promotional mixtape titled Str8 Killa No Filla, available for free download on July 29th.

But before all that, of course, we've got Freddie Gibbs: In The Tape Deck, another 36 track romp from an emcee you need to be listening to - in case you haven't been already. I myself like to adhere to the saying "don't believe the hype." It's saved me from plenty of let downs from false prophets. But though Gibbs is a darling of the blogosphere, I can't stress this enough: he reminds me of '99-'03 50 Cent, young Bun B, and above all, 2Pac - all rolled up in one. And you know me, I'm a 'Pac stan. So yeah... "believe the hype." Enjoy... and as always, turn it up!!

B.o.B: In The Tape Deck

Since I started compiling my frequently-released Tape Decks, I realized that somewhere down the road, all of this music would take up a huge amount of space. But with memory and hard drives getting cheaper by the day, I can't complain too much. One of the benefits of spending so much hard drive space in archiving all of this music is that at any given moment I can hit CTRL+F, enter an emcee's name and, just like that, I've got a playlist of all of their significant (read: Tape Deck-worthy) tracks dating back to '08. One of those artists is the recently-mentioned emcee out of Atlanta: B.o.B. This ATLien has been featured on The Tape Deck over 30 times, first appearing on The Tape Deck '08 (our first year): Volume #5. Since that time, he was added to XXL's Hip Hop Class of '09, dropped a bunch of successful mixtapes, and is now prepping the April 27 release of his debut album, B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray.

In case you still haven't caught up to B.o.B, I figured that I could help out: by compiling every Tape Deck track dating back to that first appearance on Volume #5, zipped up and ready to go ("like we always do about this time"). Think of it as a primer or late introduction to B.o.B's music. I plan on doing this for other fresh faces like Freddie Gibbs, Jay Rock and more... In the mean time, enjoy this jawn and make sure to turn it up!!